Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Free Improvisation Series: Robert Crum (part two)

Part Two: Two Souls Touch - The Robert
Crum / Stuff Smith Collaboration

In October 1944 Robert Crum
began an innovative collaboration with the violinist Stuff Smith.
Smith (Sept. 14, 1909 – Sept. 25, 1967) was a popular jazz musician
and would become of the most influential violinists in jazz history.
By the 1940's he was well-known and respected, and something of a
music industry darling. He played Alphonso Trent's territory band
on-and-off from late 1927 until 1931.16
He played with Jelly Roll Morton for a brief period in 1928. After
marrying, he settled for a time in Buffalo, NY. In 1936, he had a hit
recording with I'se a Muggin', and worked steadily at the Onyx
Club in New York City. Smith played with Fats Waller's band and
travelled to Hollywood, CA for several months in 1943. Smith returned
to New York in August 1944 for a stint at the Onyx Club.17

Prior
to his move to New York, Smith had played a steady gig at Chicago's
Garrick Stage Bar. Smith and Crum met during this period, and the two are
known to have played together at the Hamilton Hotel's Sunday
afternoon jam sessions in the summer of 1943. In a Billboard article,
Crum and Smith are given mention in a long list of other
participants, including Muggsy Spanier and Baby Dodds.18
(There is a photograph from the Otto Flückiger collection which
shows Smith and Crum sharing the bandstand.19)

Crum on-stage
(left) with Smith (right) at Chicago's Garrick Stage Bar. Photograph
from the Otto Flückiger collection; used by permission of Robert Campbell and the Red Saunders Research Foundation.

While little else is known for certain, enough pieces of evidence can be found that the following account of their collaboration can be constructed. Smith and Crum made at least three visits to the apartment of Timme Rosenkrantz and Inez
Cavanaugh: one on October 21st,
and one each on December 16th
and 18th.20 Like the recordings that became Erroll Garner's Overture to Dawn, the music that Smith and Crum played at these visits was experimental and very different from publicly-performed jazz of that period. In the words of Dr. Billy Taylor, it was “exciting, adventurous jazz, but very much ahead of its time.”21 Most of
the pieces from the October session do not appear to follow any
repeating or linear structure at all. They begin with brief
melodic or harmonic sketches, then trail off into improvised
counterpoint. Crum and Smith's level of invention and empathy is
impressive and engaging. Portions of harmonic commonality and
beautiful lyricism give way to moments of abstract association,
where the musical fabric threatens to unravel completely. But fear is
always abated, as the Smith and Crum skillfully connect to another
segment of music with taste, inevitability, and often humor.

Harmonica player Pete Pedersen.

Crum had experimented with this
type of freely-associative playing before. During his Chicago years, Crum played regularly with Pete Pedersen, who would
later become famous as a member of Jerry Murad's Harmonicats, who remembered their collaborations fondly: “We would make up songs together. We were
never booked to do this … but we'd say 'Give us a story' and we'd
make a song to it … He would play piano, I would play harmonica and
we'd just improvise.”22
(Interestingly, Pederson
also knew Smith in Chicago, and remembers that “[Smith] would show
me licks and things, and that's how I got started. That was the first
person I ever heard that really put an influence on me.”)23

The Crum/Smith collaboration
would have been significant even if these Rosenkrantz apartment
sessions were the end of the story. But as it happened, a major
effort was undertaken to publicly present their musical innovations.
In December 1944, Barry Ulanov organized the first of a series of
concerts at New York's Times Hall, which were to present “The New
Jazz”. This “First Series” featured headliners Pearl Bailey,
Barney Bigard, Erroll Garner and Stuff Smith. Don Byas and Red Norvo
were also featured. The concert was organized with assistance from
Rosenkrantz, Cavanaugh, and Paul Rosen (about whom I know nothing).24

An advertisement for the December 20th 1944 Times Hall concert.

The concert was arranged under
the auspices of View: the Modern Magazine, a quarterly periodical,
specializing in modern art, film and literature.25
Ulanov, who was also the editor of Metronome magazine, contributed a
column to each issue called “Jazz Of This Quarter”. (Ulanov would
be a significant proponent of Lennie Tristano's career a few years
later.) The impressive list of concert patrons and sponsors boasted
many prominent artists and philanthropists, including millionaires
Mary Cushing and Helena Rubenstein, ballet choreographer George de
Cuevas, sculptor Alexander Calder, composer Aaron Copland, artist
Marcel Duchamp, and many others.26
By all accounts, it was a major undertaking: certainly the highest
profile concert to date that Robert Crum had participated in.

In the evening's concert notes,
Ulanov provided the following description of the duo pieces to be played by Smith and Crum:
“Should [these] improvisations be confined to jazz? In a series of
deliberations, first canonic, then less rigorously formal, the
violinist with the jazz background, the pianist with a classical,
offer a provocative answer, as they extend the resources of the
improviser to those of all music.”27
Rather than downplaying Smith and Crum's differing musical
backgrounds, Ulanov drew attention to them, implying that “The New Jazz”
may very well draw more explicitly from other styles of music.28
A radical departure from traditional jazz, in terms of
instrumentation, style, form, and the definitions of
composition/improvisation, a performance of this music at this kind
of event constituted a major statement about the present (and future) state of American music.

Although Ulanov wrote a
predictably glowing review of the concert in the March 1945 issue of
View,29
most critics expressed skepticism, especially toward Crum. Leonard
Feather wrote, that although “Stuff was superb, unpredictable,
intensely rhythmic as ever … Crum, a frustrated classical pianist,
seemed out of place.”30Downbeat writer Frank Stacy called the improvisations “plain
disconcerting”, mentioning Crum's “disturbing nervous [on stage]
mannerisms”. Somewhat in contrast, the Modern Music quarterly wrote
a largely negative review, but noted that “The bright spot in the
[Smith & Crum] improvisation was a bitonal clash of personalities
… Neither would yield, and so the piece ended in a most peculiar
way.”31
Smith's widow Arlene Smith illuminates Stacy's comments, remembering
that Crum was “dressed in formal wear with white tennis shoes which
was pretty strange in those days”.32

The opinions of View magazine's
staff and editors is perhaps evident in that for the May issue,
Ulanov's column “Jazz of this Quarter” was taken over by Roger
Pryor Dodge, another well-respected writer of jazz. The year's
remaining two issues feature music articles, written by Lou Harrison
(October 1945) and Wilfred Mellers (December 1945), but there is
scarcely a mention of jazz in either. (Perhaps it's also worth noting
that View printed an advertisement for Ulanov's biography of Duke
Ellington in their December 1945 issue.)

Whether Ulanov's departure
from View was amicable or not remains a matter of speculation. He is nearly silent about the concert in his future recollections, but years later, he would
write that Crum's “curious combination of jazz and the classics
never entirely convinced me.”33
Though his own thoughts on the performance are presently unknown,
Crum's discouragement at such negative reviews is palpable. By April
1945 he was back in Chicago working at the Hotel Sherman. Billboard
writer John Sippel wrote that Crum, now using three mirrors instead
of just one, was playing “symphonic jazz interpretations [that are]
too intricate for the average hearer. Crum plays half a chorus
straight and then goes into a wild malange [sic] of introductions and
arpeggios that don't mean much. Crum has affected weird mannerisms
and grimaces to accompany his 88-pounding (and the word is used
literally), but the old Crum who played at Elmer's two years ago
without these new additions was far more preferable.”34
(The following month, Sippel would write that “Crum seems to have found
himself and is doing a nice job of selling from the keyboard.”35)

Crum returned to New York in
November 1945 to film two Soundies called Adventure
in Boogie Woogie and
Our Waltz.
These were released in April and August the following year.36
But he continued to work in Chicago and around the midwest. In early
1946 he found some work at the Town House in Albany.37
In June 1946 he was working at Chicago's Hotel Continental, where he
was reported as going “all out to give his individual impressions
of everything, from the classics to boogie-woogie. His playing is
average or better, but his salemanship is nil.”38
Later that summer he played for three weeks at the Radisson Hotel in
Minneapolis39
and also found work at Circus Snack Bar in St. Louis.40
In mid-September 1946 he recorded six duets with the accomplished
drummer Barrett Deems, which were released by the Chicago label Gold
Seal.41
Crum appeared on WNEW radio in December 1946 in an organ/piano duo
with fellow hotel circuit Bud Taylor (b. 1913, d. 1997)42.

In November 1947, Billboard
reported that Crum was “in a hospital for observation”.43
No more details are offered, and no further information on Crum's
life is known. To the best of current knowledge, Crum seems to have
made no further attempts at a public music career, living a private
life and passing away in Joliet, IL in May 1981.44

To
date, Crum is scarcely even a footnote in jazz history. But while
small, the legacy he has left behind is fascinating, and his
influence was perhaps not negligible. In addition to the glowing
description of their music as “ahead of its time”, Dr. Billy
Taylor places Crum alongside Erroll Garner, Bud Powell, and Al Haig as
being a notable pianist from the “Prebop and Bebop” style.45
Garner himself was reportedly very impressed by Crum's playing at the
Times Hall concert, telling him “You know, I never knew what I
wanted to do until I heard you play.”46

The recordings which were made
of the Crum/Smith collaboration have entered the digital age thanks
to Anthony Barnett's efforts, but Crum's Gold Seal recordings and
some solo piano recordings from the Rosenkrantz apartment still
remain largely inaccessible

Smith's career continued for
twenty more years until his death in 1967. Today he is regarded as
one of the most influential jazz violinists, working with some of the
most progressive jazz musicians of the 40's, 50's and 60's, playing
formally and informally with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Don
Cherry47,
and Sun Ra. He was also a great influence on the contemporary
improvising violinists Leroy Jenkins and Billy Bang. From 1965 up to
his death in 1967, he led a quartet which featured pianist Kenny Drew
and bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pederson. A concert in Denmark was
held after his death, in which major violinists Stephane Grappelli
and Jean-Luc Ponty paid tribute to Smith.48

The recordings of Smith and
Crum's duo improvisations offer glimpses into the private world of
jazz, where the creative process was free from the concerns and
interests of studios and clubs. The music frolics in and out of
tonality, seamlessly transitions from slow and fast sections, and at
every moment shows off the masterful creativity of Smith and Crum, as
they push their own and each other's technical and musical
boundaries.

25 “View:
the Modern Magazine” published between 1940 and 1947. It was
managed by Charles Henri Ford (editor) and Parker Tyler (assoc.
editor). Each issue featured a different contemporary artist:
Georgia O'Keeffe, Marcel Duchamp, and Rene Magritte to name a few.

28 In
doing so, he expresses a view which is prevalent in
contemporary discourse of improvised music. For instance, an
overview of the International Society for Improvised Music states
that “today’s musical world is increasingly characterized by
creative expressions that transcend conventional style categories.”
Improvisation is, among other things, “spontaneous interaction
between musicians from the most disparate backgrounds[.]”

29 “[The
New Jazz] sounded rich and full and vital, serene and joyful, beyond
my optimum optimism during the weeks of organizing the concert. This
was the way they wanted a jazz concert to go, these jazzmen said …
The Stuff Smith Trio, and individual artists, Erroll Garner, Pearl
Bailey, Don Byas, Robert Crum, were at peak form.” Ulanov,
in View, March 1945.

36 Barnett,
1998, p. 58. Soundies were short films of musical pieces, similar to
modern music videos. Music and film were recorded separately,
enabling choreography and cinematic techniques. They were shown in
jukebox-type machines. The first ones were made in 1940. Soundies
had seen a decline in popularity since 1941, and the company would
cease production in late 1946. See MacGillivray and Okuna, 2007.